imageStephen Jones caught a story I missed about a new Israeli particle accelerator in the September 18 English language edition of Haaretz:

Carbon-14 dating became famous after the method was used in the 1980s to test the age of what has been called the Turin Shroud, a linen cloth that, according to Christian belief, enveloped the dead body of Jesus Christ. But three different particle accelerators told a different story and determined that the shroud had been woven in the Middle Ages, more than a thousand years after Jesus’ crucifixion.

Jones comments on the story:

Since Oxford’s C-14 date did not include the removed dyed cotton threads and other two laboratories’ C-14 dates would have, the only way the three laboratories could have agreed on the `too good to be true’ 1325 +/65 years date of the Shroud is that there had to have been at least low-level "scientific fraud", of "making results appear just a little crisper or more definitive than they really are" and/or "selecting just the `best’ data for publication and ignoring those that don’t fit"

And then there is this from Jones:

It is disappointing that science journalists are still ignorantly citing the 1989 radiocarbon dating of the Shroud as a triumph for C-14 dating when in reality it is C-14 dating’s greatest scientific scandal! … Dr. Elisabetta Boaretto, director of the Radiocarbon Dating and Cosmogenic Isotopes Lab … says. "There has always been a disconnect between the exact sciences and the humanities. Science always stayed in the lab, without understanding what was happening in the field, and the archaeologist excavates and sends the findings to the lab. If the data the test finds match his assumption, he publishes something about it. If they don’t, then there was evidently a mistake in the lab.[“] This shows that, far from radiocarbon dating being the final word, if the radiocarbon date of an artifact doesn’t fit the preponderance of other evidence about that artifact, it is routine that the radiocarbon date is rejected!

imageIs this a misreading? I think it helps to read a bit more of the article:

“I don’t receive samples by mail,” she says. “There has always been a disconnect between the exact sciences and the humanities. Science always stayed in the lab, without understanding what was happening in the field, and the archaeologist excavates and sends the findings to the lab. If the data the test finds match his assumption, he publishes something about it. If they don’t, then there was evidently a mistake in the lab.

“I take a different approach. I go out to excavations not only to find the olive pit, but also to understand the connection between the olive and what we want to date … You can’t rely on examining the wooden beams used in the construction, which would tell you when the house was built. You need to find the last meal and date that.”

Dr. Boaretto seems to be suggesting an unfortunate response by some archaeologists to carbon dating results that they don’t like. I don’t think she is suggesting that “if the radiocarbon date of an artifact doesn’t fit the preponderance of other evidence about that artifact,”  that the radiocarbon date should be rejected! At least, that’s my reading of it.

Moreover, the assumptions (“preponderance of other evidence”), when it comes to the shroud, are themselves,controversial among many scholars.

But Jones is right in noting that the press (often) doesn’t tell both sides of the story.